Blogs / Science Not Fiction

The most excellent Kevin Grazier stopped by DISCOVER’s offices today — turns out that apart from being the science advisor to Battlestar Galactica and Eureka, he actually has a day job! Kevin works on the Cassini mission at JPL (hence a work-related trip out east.) Kevin also has been doing some interesting research that could upset the conventional wisdom regarding the role of Jupiter in the history of the solar system.

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I have been laid low for the last few days by some dreadful lurgy I caught on the plane back from San Diego, but people have been hard at work behind the scenes putting together this edit of the video of our “Science Behind Science Fiction Panel” at this year’s Comic-con. From left to right you have Kevin Grazier (science advisor to Eureka and Battlestar Galactica), Jaime Paglia (co-creater and executive producer of Eureka), Phil Plait (Bad Astronomy blogger) and myself. We talked about how science makes its way into a script, how scientific accuracy is maintained (or not) and the value of retconning. Enjoy!

We had a great panel yesterday chewing over how great science can make science fiction. Thanks to Jaime Paglia, co-creater and executive producer of Eureka (Eureka’s third season premieres on the SCIFI channel on Tuesday), Kevin Grazier (science advisor to Eureka and Battlestar Galactica), and our very own Bad Astronomy blogger, Phil Plait.

Hopefully, we’ll be able to have some video from the panel before long: what’s clear is that on Battlestar and Eureka, while making a good show that people will want to watch is obviously their first priority, the producers and writers really do care about getting the science right — which means lots of grist for Science Not Fiction to blog about in the months to come. Yay!

Just out of a Comic-con panel celebrating 30 years of the Battlestar Galactica franchise. Present were Richard Hatch (who plays Tom Zarek in the new series and played Apollo in the original); Bear McCreary (who composes the music for the show, and told us that Ron Moore was very specific, for reasons as yet unannounced but which will become clear, about using Dylan’s “Along the Watchtower” as the background music to the season three finale, in which four humans are revealed as cylons); Kevin Grazier (Battlestar’s science advisor and panelist on DISCOVER’s “Science in Science Fiction” panel later today); and, interestingly, Tom DeSanto (best known as the producer of X-Men and Transformers.)

DeSanto was just weeks away from filming his own TV relaunch of Battlestar Galactica in 2001: set construction had begun and FOX had agreed to a pilot. A confluence of events (including 9/11 and problems with X-Men 2) caused the deal with FOX to fall through. This series was intended to be a continuation of the 1979 show, not a complete re-imagining from the ground up, as happened in Ron Moore’s version. DeSanto sketched out the premise of this version: about five years after the end of the original series, the rag tag fleet had a vote and decided to stop searching for Earth, opting instead to build a giant spacestation near an asteroid field. Before long the Cylons are forgotten in the pursuit of commerce and “pleasure domes.” Until another twenty years pass and the Cylons return… Richard Hatch would also have returned in this version — this time as a human being converted into a Cylon hybrid.

One thing remains constant across all the continuations and re-imaginings: no one appears willing to resurrect Galactica 1980.